Discussion

Recover Apple Keychain

nabbed: Based on this description, it sounds like someone walking past your unattended desk and bent on disrupting your day but not stealing your data, could enter in a garbage password into the lock screen a few times and lock you out of your own laptop.I guess the same also works for cloud accounts as well. I remember, back in the mid-2000s, trying to log into my hotmail account (never having failed to log in before) and getting a "locked out due to too many bad passwords". So someone, only knowing my user account name (which was the same as my email address), locked me out of my own account. The problem was, I couldn't remember what my recovery accounts were (I eventually figured it out).

zapkyeskrill: Good information to have. I was surprised by step 2 though (rm login.keychain-db). How can you be absolutely sure it doesn't contain anything important and you won't need it later?I'd probably opt for a more defensive action here and just rename it (like the original reset did).

varispeed: Remember entering password to one service I subscribed to. It was Friday evening. I typed it wrong 5 times and my account was locked out with a message to contact customer service. Customer service was open from Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. So I was unable to use it for a couple of days. It was painful experience. I found an alternative though and on Monday cancelled it.

duskwuff: The description is misleading. What locked OP out of their keychain was resetting their login password, not the password attempts.(The login keychain is encrypted using the user's password, so it's reasonable to create a new one when the password is changed - otherwise, you end up in a situation where applications constantly pop up prompts for a password the user doesn't know when they try to access the keychain. I've seen this happen on older versions of macOS and it's positively infuriating.)

fastaguy88: Apple Keychain has a number of old bugs that have caused me to have to resort to this strategy several times. The most common problem is having a secure note that you can open, but then immediately disappears (closes). Copying over an older keychain database can sometimes solve the problem.